Re: [PATCH v7 1/4] spinlock: A new lockref structure for locklessupdate of refcount

From: Sedat Dilek
Date: Fri Aug 30 2013 - 05:56:14 EST


On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> * Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Linus Torvalds
>> > <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 8:12 PM, Waiman Long <waiman.long@xxxxxx> wrote:
>> >>> On 08/29/2013 07:42 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Waiman? Mind looking at this and testing? Linus
>> >>>
>> >>> Sure, I will try out the patch tomorrow morning and see how it works out for
>> >>> my test case.
>> >>
>> >> Ok, thanks, please use this slightly updated patch attached here.
>> >>
>> >> It improves on the previous version in actually handling the
>> >> "unlazy_walk()" case with native lockref handling, which means that
>> >> one other not entirely odd case (symlink traversal) avoids the d_lock
>> >> contention.
>> >>
>> >> It also refactored the __d_rcu_to_refcount() to be more readable, and
>> >> adds a big comment about what the heck is going on. The old code was
>> >> clever, but I suspect not very many people could possibly understand
>> >> what it actually did. Plus it used nested spinlocks because it wanted
>> >> to avoid checking the sequence count twice. Which is stupid, since
>> >> nesting locks is how you get really bad contention, and the sequence
>> >> count check is really cheap anyway. Plus the nesting *really* didn't
>> >> work with the whole lockref model.
>> >>
>> >> With this, my stupid thread-lookup thing doesn't show any spinlock
>> >> contention even for the "look up symlink" case.
>> >>
>> >> It also avoids the unnecessary aligned u64 for when we don't actually
>> >> use cmpxchg at all.
>> >>
>> >> It's still one single patch, since I was working on lots of small
>> >> cleanups. I think it's pretty close to done now (assuming your testing
>> >> shows it performs fine - the powerpc numbers are promising, though),
>> >> so I'll split it up into proper chunks rather than random commit
>> >> points. But I'm done for today at least.
>> >>
>> >> NOTE NOTE NOTE! My test coverage really has been pretty pitiful. You
>> >> may hit cases I didn't test. I think it should be *stable*, but maybe
>> >> there's some other d_lock case that your tuned waiting hid, and that
>> >> my "fastpath only for unlocked case" version ends up having problems
>> >> with.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Following this thread with half an eye... Was that "unsigned" stuff
>> > fixed (someone pointed to it).
>> > How do you call that test-patch (subject)?
>> > I would like to test it on my SNB ultrabook with your test-case script.
>> >
>>
>> Here on Ubuntu/precise v12.04.3 AMD64 I get these numbers for total loops:
>>
>> lockref: w/o patch | w/ patch
>> ======================
>> Run #1: 2.688.094 | 2.643.004
>> Run #2: 2.678.884 | 2.652.787
>> Run #3: 2.686.450 | 2.650.142
>> Run #4: 2.688.435 | 2.648.409
>> Run #5: 2.693.770 | 2.651.514
>>
>> Average: 2687126,6 VS. 2649171,2 ( ???37955,4 )
>
> For precise stddev numbers you can run it like this:
>
> perf stat --null --repeat 5 ./test
>
> and it will measure time only and print the stddev in percentage:
>
> Performance counter stats for './test' (5 runs):
>
> 1.001008928 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.00% )
>

Hi Ingo,

that sounds really good :-).

AFAICS 'make deb-pkg' does not have support to build linux-tools
Debian package where perf is included.
Can I run an older version of perf or should I / have to try with the
one shipped in Linux v3.11-rc7+ sources?
How can I build perf standalone, out of my sources?

- Sedat -
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/